A moment later the discovery was unearthed, and Oswald lifted it up with
both hands.
"It's a dragon's head," Noel said, and it certainly looked like it. It
was long and narrowish and bony, and with great yellow teeth sticking in
the jaw.
Bill came back just then and said it was a horse's head, but H. O. and
Noel would not believe it, and Oswald owns that no horse he has ever
seen had a head at all that shape.
But Oswald did not stop to argue, because he saw a keeper who showed me
how to set snares going by, and he wanted to talk to him about ferrets,
so he went off, and Dicky and Denny and Alice with him. Also Daisy and
Dora went off to finish reading _Ministering Children_. So H. O. and
Noel were left with the bony head. They took it away.
The incident had quite faded from the mind of Oswald next day. But just
before breakfast Noel and H. O. came in, looking hot and anxious. They
had got up early and had not washed at all--not even their hands and
faces. Noel made Oswald a secret signal. All the others saw it, and with
proper delicate feeling pretended not to have.
When Oswald had gone out with Noel and H. O., in obedience to the secret
signal, Noel said:
"You know that dragon's head yesterday?"
"Well?" Oswald said, quickly, but not crossly--the two things are quite
different.
"Well, you know what happened in Greek history when some chap sowed
dragon's teeth?"
"They came up armed men," said H. O.; but Noel sternly bade him shut up,
and Oswald said "Well," again. If he spoke impatiently it was because he
smelled the bacon being taken in to breakfast.
"Well," Noel went on, "what do you suppose would have come up if we'd
sowed those dragon's teeth we found yesterday?"
"Why, nothing, you young duffer," said Oswald, who could now smell the
coffee. "All that isn't History--it's Humbug. Come on in to brekker."
"It's _not_ humbug," H. O. cried, "it _is_ history. We _did_ sow--"
"Shut up," said Noel again. "Look here, Oswald. We did sow those
dragon's teeth in Randall's ten-acre meadow, and what do you think has
come up?"
"Toadstools, I should think," was Oswald's contemptible rejoinder.
"They have come up a camp of soldiers," said Noel--"_armed men_. So you
see it _was_ history. We have sowed army-seed, just like Cadmus, and it
has come up. It was a very wet night. I dare say that helped it along."
Oswald could not decide which to disbelieve--his brother or his ears. So
disguising his doubtful emotions without a word, he led the way to the
bacon and the banqueting hall.
He said nothing about the army-seed then, neither did Noel and H. O.
But after the bacon we went into the garden, and then the good elder
brother said:
"Why don't you tell the others your cock-and-bull story?"
So they did, and their story was received with warm expressions of
doubt. It was Dicky who observed:
"Let's go and have a squint at Randall's ten-acre, anyhow. I saw a hare
there the other day."
We went. It is some little way, and as we went disbelief reigned superb
in every breast except Noel's and H. O.'s, so you will see that even the
ready pen of the present author cannot be expected to describe to you
his variable sensations when he got to the top of the hill and suddenly
saw that his little brothers had spoken the truth. I do not mean that
they generally tell lies, but people make mistakes sometimes and the
effect is the same as lies if you believe them.
There _was_ a camp there with real tents and soldiers in gray and red
tunics. I dare say the girls would have said coats. We stood in ambush,
too astonished even to think of lying in it, though of course we know
that this is customary. The ambush was the wood on top of the little
hill, between Randall's ten-acre meadow and Sugden's Waste Wake pasture.
"There would be cover here for a couple of regiments," whispered Oswald,
who was, I think, gifted by Fate with the far-seeingness of a born
general.
Alice merely said "Hist," and we went down to mingle with the troops as
though by accident, and seek for information.
The first man we came to at the edge of the camp was cleaning a sort of
cauldron thing like witches brew bats in.
We went up to him and said, "Who are you? Are you English, or are you
the enemy?"
"We're the enemy," he said, and he did not seem ashamed of being what he
was. And he spoke English with quite a good accent for a foreigner.
"The enemy!" Oswald echoed, in shocked tones. It is a terrible thing to
a loyal and patriotic youth to see an enemy cleaning a pot in an English
field, with English sand, and looking as much at home as if he was in
his foreign fastnesses.
The enemy seemed to read Oswald's thoughts with deadly unerringness. He
said:
"The English are somewhere over on the other side of the hill. They are
trying to keep us out of Maidstone."
After this our plan of mingling with the troops did not seem worth going
on with. This soldier, in spite of his unerringness in reading Oswald's
inmost heart, seemed not so very sharp in other things, or he would
never have given away his secret plans like this, for he must have known
from our accents that we were Britons to the backbone. Or perhaps
(Oswald thought this, and it made his blood at once boil and freeze,
which our uncle had told us was possible, but only in India), perhaps he
thought that Maidstone was already as good as taken and it didn't
matter what he said. While Oswald was debating within his intellect what
to say next, and how to say it so as to discover as many as possible of
the enemy's dark secrets, Noel said:
"How did you get here? You weren't here yesterday at tea-time."
The soldier gave the pot another sandy rub, and said:
"I dare say it does seem quick work--the camp seems as if it had sprung
up in the night, doesn't it?--like a mushroom."
Alice and Oswald looked at each other, and then at the rest of us. The
words "_sprung up in the night_" seemed to touch a string in every
heart.
"You see," whispered Noel, "he won't tell us how he came here. _Now_, is
it humbug or history?"
Oswald, after whisperedly requesting his young brother to dry up and not
bother, remarked:
"Then you're an invading army?"
"Well," said the soldier, "we're a skeleton battalion, as a matter of
fact, but we're invading all right enough."
And now indeed the blood of the stupidest of us froze, just as the
quick-witted Oswald's had done earlier in the interview. Even H. O.
opened his mouth and went the color of mottled soap; he is so fat that
this is the nearest he can go to turning pale.